Rating: 
Summary: Gourmet cinema
Review: Finely mounted, adapted, and acted.
Two elderly sisters live on an island, their entire lives having been devoted to religious piety and serving the community. An exiled French woman arrives and introduces finer cooking which unwittingly carry social and spiritual implications in the conservative and spartan setting. The movie is most remarkable when it counterpoises the dignity of spiritual propreity with the glory of sensual delight. The obvious thing would have been to ridicule the elder ladies as priggish, but the films opts for subtlety, sensitivity, and understanding.
Rating: 
Summary: Spectacular, delicious, beautiful
Review: Toward the end of this beautiful movie, the origin of the title becomes clear. Babette, a refugee, has spent 14 years as a cook in the home of two fervently religious sisters who live in a village of like-minded, conservative, ser-in-their-own-ways country folk. When Babette wins the lottery, she (a former gourmet chef) spends every centime on the preparation of a sumptuous feast of many courses with separate wines for each as her offering of gratitude for their sheltering her.
To watch the arrival of the exotic ingredients, the preparation, the serving, the gradual loosening of tight strictures as the villagers sample, taste, savor, and dive in, tongues and belts and opinions gradually loosened by the effects of exquisite food and wine, is to be seduced as surely as by a lover.
Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. This is the movie, made in 1988, that started the spate of other food genre films.
Rating:
Summary: Babette's Feast: Satisfaction Guaranteed
Review: I watched Babette's Feast in my Women in Literature class this evening, and I enjoyed so much I'm going to buy it. The scenery and costuming are a feast to the eyes, and the storyline is very satisfying on a spiritual level.
Plot summary isn't my forte, but if you want to watch a movie that was produced by people who care about the visual and audio details as well as a story that is performed well and with subtly by excellent actors, then Babette's Feast should be first on your list of foreign films. It refreshingly lacks the Hollywood glitz and glitter of a regurgitated plotline. It's a movie that sates hunger on all levels of consciousness.
Rating:
Summary: Like I say...
Review: A little lovin' and some good food makes for a happy civilization and the French seem to undertsand that altogether. This is the story of a French woman who reluctantly finds herself on Danish soil in order to escape upheavel in France during one of it's many revolutions. She is a 10 star chef but enters as a maidservant for these two homely sisters that basically eat puritanical food and dress the same. Not realizing who they have amongst them, they go about average every day "bla" that they call life. However, their new servant is spicing life up little by little for the people around her simply by adding flavor to little things like soup, etc. Because of her talents everyone simply has a more tolerable life in the Danish village. Then it gets astoundingly better when Babette wins some money and opts to use it to purchase ingredients for the best feast she can imagine, just like she did at her restraunt in France. The nervous sisters apologize beforehand to the Villagers as if they have something to be ashamed of simply because Babette asked them to organize a feast. It's amazing what religion and puritanical beliefs rob people of. Don't you agree? (Said blowing a kiss in the air and taking a drag of an imaginary cigarette). Needless to say, the Villagers were changed in an almost spiritual way after the meal that love produced. Great film, especially for Chefs.
Rating:
Summary: a tender and touching illustration of God's grace
Review: I got the movie as a result of reading the section on it in _What's So Amazing About Grace_ by Philip Yancey pg 19ff Just go get the movie and watch it, read the reviews later.... So you're back. Tear jerker and thoughtful both. very nice.
So what is grace?
How did they miss it so long?
How could someone so talented be content to cook stale wet bread and boiled dried cod? Grace is free for the receivers, expensive to the giver.
We can spend a lifetime fighting grace and completely miss the point. It is there among us all the time. but we miss it because we are looking for it in the wrong places.
Self denial, anger, lack of love, cloud our thinking and allow us to miss the banquet of grace.
but we recognize it when it is there, we are seduced by it, and the old dance in the moonlight as a result. Healed, full, flavorful. She was home, where she belonged, her family had been killed. Like the sisters she was doing her duty, what she felt was her destiny. Waiting patiently to demonstrate her love. Nice movie. Sorry i missed it for so long.
Rating:
Summary: Moving Film
Review: Truly one of the best movies ever made.
Rating:
Summary: my new favorite movie
Review: this movie was truly amazing. i have to say that i was crying uncontrollably at the end. and i really don't even know why. i was just so moved and so happy. maybe it's just because i only slept 5 hours last night. the people portrayed are so selfless it made me want to go outside and give a homeless person a really good sandwich.
great film
Rating:
Summary: The Joy of Life
Review: The story takes place in a remote town in Denmark. There is one grocery in the town. Not much changes. The town's people are self-sufficent.
The camera is moving slowly. Even though the last part is the delightful feast, the overall atmosphere isn't light. The two sisters lead their religious life, which is so restricted, somewhat closed. They are living like in a monastery. But after Babette comes to the villge, some liveliness springs up. When she buys fish from a fisherman, she bargains for more fish and sings in the grocery. She knows the joy of life.
Babbette's feast is to deliver her appreciation to the sisters. I think this movie conveys God's grace is like Babette's devotion which let people enjoy their life and love one another. Besides, the feast also shows the richness of nature God gives us. Babbette's feast gives great joy to all people in the town.
Rating:
Summary: Who is that mysterious French maid?
Review: The film revolves around a simple, god-fearing, rural community. They can remind you a lot of Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter village. Given the right circumstances-famine, epidemic, or natural disaster-you can easily imagine them looking around for witches to burn.
What keeps this lot in line is the steadying influence of two sisters who commit their lives to caring for their community and keeping the flame of their tiny puritanical sect. See them making ale soup, carting it over to their elderly neighbors, and serving it up out of a tureen. See them leading the hymns around the dining room table where they conduct their bible studies.
Their commitment comes with a steep personal price tag. One of them has given up the love of a wealthy and powerful man. The other renounced a brilliant career in the opera. The members of their fellowship repay them, not with gratitude and right living, but by bickering among themselves over petty slights, some commited decades ago.
This is where a lesser film would invite the viewer to conclude, "What a waste. What a train wreck."
But Babette's Feast doesn't let you dismiss the self sacrifice of these two gentle women that easily. Yes, they could have made more of a splash, they could have had a lot more fun, they could have been written up, they could have had bigger funerals.
But, in the vast spectrum, is what they achieve really less important? Death is the great equalizer, and, in old age, we mystically repossess both what we affirmed and what we rejected, this film would have you believe, reminding viewers of some of Bergman's more baffling religious hypotheses.
That said, the story of these two dedicated sisters would be virtually unbearable without the curveball thrown into their lives by their maid, Babette, a refugee from the French revolution. One of the Danish sisters' scorned lovers sends Babette their way because he knows their kindness and sincere Christianity will not allow them to abandon her.
Babette blends seamlessly into this strict Danish household, serving endless pots of tea to the fellowship and learning to make ale soup without grimacing. In fact, she is so stoical about all the household's petty economies that we know at once there's more to Babette than meets the eye. No ordinary person could ask for so little or display so little ego.
After 20 years of haggling over the price of locally caught fish and sorting through the market potatoes, Babette wins the lottery. She takes a brisk stroll down to the beach and looks out over the water, presumably in the direction of France. There she makes her decision. She will cook a good French dinner for the people who, in all ignorance and kindness, took her in so many years ago. Whether they like it or not.
The caravan of excellent wines and exotic foods-including live quail in cages-that starts arriving at their house throws the sisters into a religious tizzy. Will they lose their souls to all this worldliness?
One of the guests recognizes Babette from an escargot dish she serves, and the secret of her identity is revealed.
The tug of war in this film between self-sacrifice and self-indulgence, simplicity and luxury, is so intense, we keep expecting someone to be badly hurt. But the beauty is, no one does. And director Gabriel Axel leads us to an unexpectedly sweet and slightly comical ending while making a statement along the way about the strength and independence of the true artist.
Rating:
Summary: I WISH I COULD EXPLAIN
Review: I WISH I COULD EXPLAIN WHY I WOULD GIVE THIS MOVIE 5 STARS. I CANT IMAGINE THAT I CAN BE MESMERIZED BY A 20 MINUTE SCENE OF PEOPLE EATING BUT I CANT TAKE MY EYES OF THE SCREEN, AND ITS FOREIGN ALSO!!!
LIKE I SAID I CANT EXPLAIN HOW THIS MOVIE SUCKED ME IN AND I DONT EVEN KNOW IF I CAN RECOMMEND IT BUT ANY MOVIE WERE I CAN SIT AND WATCH PEOPLE EAT AND BE FASCINATED DESERVES 5 STARS FROM ME
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